Musings about games, religion, politics, and other forms of entertainment.

Friday, October 05, 2007

Starting to collect results

So far I've managed to scan every Digg.com story that relates to my chosen topics. When you search Digg for a story, you get a list of all the stories that were ever submitted to Digg with the search words appearing in the title. First somebody submits a page, and then other people come along and recommend the page. The page winds up with a "score" that indicates the total number of people who recommended the same site.

Collected below is output from my analysis that shows how many stories appeared, followed by the average score of all the stories.

I've highlighted a couple of interesting numbers in bold italics. Notice that "Paris Hilton" and "Britney Spears" both have a very high numbers of pages, indicating that many people found stories about those people that they considered were worth submitting. (Most of them, by the way, are jokes or empty promises of smut.) But other people either don't read those stories, or don't like them enough to recommend them.

On the other hand, look which topic is far and away the clear winner of the Digg scoring game: Rudy Giuliani with an average of 18.6. In fact, Rudy's average score is more than twice as high as the average of his next political competitor Hillary Clinton.

Um, yeah. Are you noticing a pattern here? They're all negative. Not some of them. All of the top nine stories. Apparently people love to read about Giuliani so they can reinforce how much they hate him.

To be fair, Hillary Clinton's page has a lot of negative stories too, but certainly not all of them. Many of the hits are anti right wing coverage, and people apparently reacted well to her TV spoof of "The Sopranos" with Bill.

Disclaimer: Digg users are not a representative sample of the general public, but they are my stand-ins for them. Digg users are a self-selected group of active news readers. What Nixon referred to as "The silent majority," aka "People who don't pay attention" are not represented here, and I have no way of knowing which stories they would recommend if they were asked.